Freetown's TreeTracker — Micropayments for Verified Tree Survival (Sierra Leone)

Freetown's August 2017 mudslide, which killed more than 1,000 people after decades of hillside deforestation, pushed tree cover and flood risk to the centre of the city's 'Transform Freetown' strategy. Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr's administration launched #FreetownTheTreeTown to rebuild vegetation cover while creating short-term income for residents.

Community growers — largely women and young people — plant and tend saplings, then use the TreeTracker smartphone app to geotag each tree and photograph it over time. Once a quarter, city staff verify surviving trees against these records and pay growers mobile-money micropayments and redeemable tokens tied to survival milestones, rather than to trees simply planted.

UrbanShift reports roughly 250,000 trees planted and tracked in the initial 2020-21 phase (plus 50,000 planned coastal mangroves), through 10 commercial nurseries and 10 community-based organisations, creating over 550 short-term jobs. The city cites more than 1 million trees planted since 2020 and targets 5 million by 2030 and 20 million by 2050, with an 80% survival rate claimed from app-tracked monitoring. The programme was a 2023 Earthshot Prize finalist and is highlighted by C40 as a self-financing, replicable model, since growers are paid from the city's own tree-planting budget rather than one-off grants.

The model has limits worth noting: The Conversation has argued its replicability elsewhere in Africa is constrained by Freetown's specific institutional set-up and continued donor support, and no independent, peer-reviewed verification of the claimed survival rate or carbon benefit was found — the evidence is largely self-reported through the city's own app and partner write-ups.

Read the full analysis: https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/Freetown-s-highly-replicable-way-of-self-financing-urban-reforestation?language=en_US